EU attacks anti-spam industry
A senior European Union official has berated the anti-spam industry for failure to agree a common strategy. Philippe Gerard said that lack of co-operation was handicapping the fight to hold back the junk mail tsunami.
"We see different initiatives going in all different directions and the effectiveness is maybe not there," Gerard, an official with the EC's Information Society directorate, told an anti-spam meeting in London. The BBC reports that Gerard said that spam was affecting consumer confidence.
The comments come at the same time as new stats from email filtering firm MessageLabs, which reckons May 2004 was the worst month for spam on record. Of the 909m inbound emails scanned by the MessageLabs anti-spam service, 691.5m were intercepted as spam, equating to a global spam ratio of 3 in every 4 emails (76 per cent).
Two years ago the EU passed a framework directive outlawing many spamming practices but there has been a lack of consistency in the anti-spam laws subsequently enacted by European states much less between European laws and the US's CAN-SPAM Act. Gerard would be a better position to criticise the anti-spam industry for inconsistency if and when government agree to a common legislative approach.
A multi-faceted attack on spam combining technology with legislation against spammers and user education is needed to clamp down on the spam problem. Get past the hype (not easy) and most vendors will admit that the anti-spam industry is in its infancy. It's therefore no surprise that a number of different approaches (gateway appliance, filtering at the desktop, managed services etc.) have been developed to tackle the junk mail menace. Likewise discussions about modifying protocols to make it easier to identify and reject spam traffic are not bad thing.
Reproduced from an article published by The Register
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The original article can be viewed here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/08/spam_tsunami/
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